My friends and I play a game during Tennessee sporting events in which we make fun of the ignorantly fickle and shortsighted nature of some fans. When the Florida baseball team took the lead on the Vols last weekend, my friends began texting each about the demise of Tony Vitello. “He’s resting on his laurels.” “Over the hill.” When Tennessee mounted a successful comeback and won the game, we quickly changed our playful tune. “Vitello is the greatest coach of all time.” “Danny White needs to get out the checkbook and sign him to a lifetime contract.”

I know very little about baseball, but I know enough not to extrapolate three innings indefinitely into the future.

There is a difference between statistical noise and a trend. Few things in life move in a straight line, although many things move in a reasonably predictable direction. It’s just as true with baseball as it is the stock market.

A commentator on CNBC recently forecasted that the price of Tesla stock would likely continue its decline over the next 4 weeks. The next guest on the show was billionaire investor Ron Baron who essentially chuckled at the 4-week prognostication. “We have no idea what will happen to the stock over the next 4 weeks. No one does. But over the next 4 years Tesla will sell a lot more cars than it does today.”

Baron heads the only actively managed mutual fund to outperform the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index over the past 5, 10, and 15 years. “Invest for the long term is the idea,” Baron modestly explains.

A long-term focus is easier when you understand the fundamental causes of a particular outcome – and when you accept that you don’t know the causes of certain short-term vacillations. Ron Baron knows that in the long term, the price of a stock will move in the direction and general magnitude of the earnings of the company. And he knows that in the short term, prices will move in reaction to almost anything – and most of those things are impossible to regularly anticipate.

People look for reasons to explain things they don’t understand, often influenced by a core bias or belief system.

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently dropped 1,200 points in two days in March, Trump haters glibly and quickly declared that the Trump bear market had begun, and a horrible recession was imminent. But they failed to credit Trump for a similar increase in January.

In the past 40 years, the US stock market has experienced a bear market about every seven years. At some point we will have another one – just like Tennessee will eventually lose a couple of baseball games. Neither will change my positive outlook on either the U.S. economy or Tony Vitello.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.